“But the kind of originality that everyone shares is not the kind of originality that modern romantics require in order to feel fully individuated in mass society. What they need is original originality, or meta-originality, as it were. This sets up the equivalent of an arms race, with more and more extravagant gestures required to …
Concupisco Ergo Sum
“The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays …
And Burn All Their Houses
“If someone says that no ethical standards are fixed, and so we ought not to apply our standards to anybody else, we now know what to ask. What does the good gentleman mean, “we ought not”? If ethical standards are not fixed, then the conclusion could just as easily be that we ought to apply …
More Postmodern Hooey
“I part company with [postmodern] writers, when they reject the notion of a normative human nature or deny that we can know about such a nature . . . The Enlightenment did not invent the concept of a universal human nature or the notion of a universal moral law, nor did Immanuel Kant or St. …
Warping the Men
“The sex carnival that is college life today is also doing great damage to our sons’ characters, deforming their attitudes toward the opposite sex. I am witnessing a perceptible dissolution of manly virtue in the young men I teach” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 148).
Calvinism and Evangelism
“The principal problem here is not the fact that evangelicals adopted Calvinism and consequently lost their zeal for evangelism, but rather that postmillennial Calvinists abandoned their postmillennialism and consequently lost their conviction that the gospel would go forth into the world, conquering and to conquer” (Mother Kirk, p. 249).
How the Modern University Gangs Up on Women
“It is, rather, that these young men know they can force matters further because the rules and institutional safeguards under which young women once upon a time could take protective cover are gone. Let us not kid ourselves: Coed dorms and apartments work to the advantage of male sexual aggression at the expense of female …
Whitewash for the Sepulcher
“Sentimentality is the feeble attempt of our lax and liberal culture to claim innocence where there is transgression and perversity, to ignore tragedy in the desperate endeavor to feel comfortable” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).
Stories We Live By
“Yet just as there is right and wrong, there are good stories and bad stories. Stories not only reflect life, they shape it. It is of no small account what stories we tell and what stories we live by” (Vigen Guroian, Rallying the Really Human Things, p. 61).
Moral Imagination
“If that is the imagination, what is the moral imagination? The eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke first coined the term in his great work Reflections on the Revolution in France . . . The moral imagination is the distinctively human power to conceive of men and women as moral beings . . . Modern …